Advertise on podcast: AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

Forty-seven seconds. That’s how far ahead Gelu Sulugiuc’s machines finished when IBM dropped disappointing numbers: a clean headline with revenue against the FactSet estimate, published before a legacy terminal had typed a word. In trading, forty-seven seconds is the difference between catching a move and paying for someone else’s. Gelu knows both sides of that race. He started as a financial journalist at Bloomberg, racing to push headlines out by hand under brutal pressure. His team was fast, but he saw the ceiling: people can’t outrun machines. So he co-founded PLX AI to train models that pull market-moving news straight from press releases. Thomson Reuters bought it in 2022, back when PLX had just three people and before ChatGPT changed everything. After the exit came three weeks of hiking in New Zealand. Then Gelu went straight back to work. His new company, Financial News Systems, is what happens when you take the PLX idea all the way. Instead of leaning on general-purpose chatbots that are slow, expensive at scale and prone to hallucination, FNS trains its own specialized models to read millions of documents from 9,000+ companies across the US, Canada and Europe. Gelu says the output lands in 100 to 150 milliseconds, with accuracy above 99.8%. Day traders get it for $25 a month. Algorithmic traders pipe it in as structured data that fires trades with no human involved. Through a partnership with Dow Jones Newswires, FNS headlines reach terminals at Bloomberg, LSEG and FactSet. Ryan and Gelu dig into the playbook behind it. They cover why “your model is the data,” and how a €1.5M pre-seed goes further when one developer using Claude does the work of three. They get into why an affiliate program flopped (nobody wants to share their edge), and why paid subscribers almost never cancel. They also talk about the psychology of trading: do your homework, know your thesis, and decide how much you’re willing to lose before you place the bet. The moment you break your own rules is when you get into trouble. There’s plenty of fun too. Gelu runs five 5Ks a week on a plan from an Olympian friend who reviews his Strava, he admits to catching up on modern European football after a 20-year break, and he explains why he funds scholarships at Ithaca College, the school that gave him a full ride in the ’90s. This one is for founders building where speed is the moat, and for anyone who wants to stop doom-refreshing and let a machine watch the river for them. Financial News Systems: https://www.financialnewssystems.com Ithaca College: https://www.ithaca.edu Gelu Sulugiuc on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gelusulugiuc Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

What if the most valuable thing your highly paid experts do has nothing to do with their computers? That question kept Joe Esteves up at night. As CEO of Maine Pointe, the supply chain and operations consulting firm ranked #1 by Consulting.us, he kept walking into project rooms full of consultants clicking away at screens while clients waited outside. So he asked his team to do the math on how much of their work actually required a computer. The answer was too much, and it lit the fuse on one of the boldest AI transformations in consulting. In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes sits down with Joe to unpack how Maine Pointe rebuilt itself from the ground up to become what Joe calls the first AI-native performance improvement firm. Joe breaks down his AI maturity ladder: Unaware, Aware, Enabled, Embedded, and Native. He explains why “if your agents aren’t running, you’re not in business” is now the bar. He shares the playbook: Recruiting machine learning engineers from Berkeley and Stanford on mission-length tours of dutyBuilding a knowledge layer that puts 22 years of firm history at everyone’s fingertipsGiving every employee a $5,000 training budget, then watching who ran toward itAnd he tells the hard part straight. When some team members resisted, he offered them a choice: take a number and walk, or stay and build what’s next. Joe says research-and-information firms are “cooked,” and that his own team insists on workflows, not tools. The conversation widens to the state of supply chain itself: Volatility is the new normal, and strategy now runs on 90-day pivots.Cash is king, because 20% profitability on zero product is still zero.Joe’s clients are talking about growth, not cuts.Reshoring is real, with Asian manufacturers now planning U.S. plants.The labor gap is the catch. Factories can’t find reliable workers even at $20 to $25 an hour, and 28% of U.S. adults score at the lowest literacy levels.Then it gets personal. Asked what he has sacrificed for the company, Joe opens up about missed family memories. He shares the advice that changed him: treat life like a sales call. Show up prepared, phone off, fully present. He also champions the Children’s Advocacy Center of Charlotte, formerly Pat’s Place, which protects and heals abused children in Mecklenburg County. And yes, Ryan asks him about UAPs. If you’re a founder trying to automate your business with AI without losing the human edge that makes it valuable, this one is your blueprint. Maine Pointe: https://mainepointe.com Children’s Advocacy Center of Charlotte (formerly Pat’s Place): https://cacclt.org Ryan Estes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter: https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life: https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai: https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job: https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous: https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist: https://taelor.style/ Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent: https://gethowdi.com/

Lior Illouz once walked fifteen meters, turned around, and walked fifteen meters back. He did it for four hours a day, four days straight, without speaking to anyone. Somewhere around the hundredth turn, a memory from second grade surfaced that he didn’t know he still had. That was Thailand, right after seven years at Meta across Singapore, London and Tel Aviv. The paycheck was gone and so was the title, and Lior was left with the question every founder meets after an exit or a failed project: who am I when I’m not that company? His answer became Bonds, an AI relationship coach backed by PhD psychology and built around one stubborn idea. The best relationship app is the one that sends you back to your actual relationship as fast as possible. In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes and Lior dig into a survey that just set the internet on fire: half of Americans say a romantic relationship with an AI counts as cheating. They debate whether a lonely guy with a chatbot girlfriend and a humanoid robot on backorder is a Black Mirror episode or next Tuesday. Ryan makes the case that humor is the one thing a robot can’t fake, and Lior brings the data from South Korea, Japan and China on what happens to societies that stop connecting. Then they get practical. Lior explains why Bonds started as a couples app and pivoted to serve the individual first, since so many people want to work on their relationship before their partner is ready to join. He walks through the Duolingo-style chapters, the conversation simulator that scores your tone before you say the hard thing, and the action loop that turns advice into habit change. He also shares how Bonds avoids becoming a yes-man that always takes your side, why the product is designed against endless engagement, and where the guardrails still need to get stronger. The moment that will stick with you is a glass jar holding 38 handwritten notes for his wife’s 38th birthday. The idea came from Bonds. The tears came from both of them. Listener offer: The first 50 AI for Founders listeners who visit heybonds.com/founders get Bonds free for six months. https://heybonds.app.link/founders - The first 50 AI for Founders listeners who visit heybonds.com/founders get Bonds free for six months.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/heybonds/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heybonds/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@heybondsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heybondsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heybondsSave the Children: https://www.savethechildren.org About AI for Founders: AI for Founders is the podcast and newsletter where Ryan Estes talks with the founders putting AI to work, at https://aiforfounders.co. Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Jason Katz can make a 12-minute YouTube video, from research to final cut, in under an hour of his own time. The secret isn't the software he built. It's that a machine interviews him first. This What It Do opens with cereal, takes a detour through the Bible, and lands on the most practical tour of an AI content engine we've ever done. Ryan kicks things off with a new installment of his notes to younger Ryan, titled "Respect the carnal." Raised in the '90s youth group era, when anything that felt good felt like sin, Ryan now draws a sharper line. Some pleasures fade the moment they're consumed, like a whole loaf of Wonder Bread with Skippy and Welch's. Others are hard, sweaty, and painful while you do them, and those are the ones that pay off. Jason connects it to the YouTube video he'd posted hours earlier, which argues that AI is making us dumber and that fulfillment comes from choosing the hard thing. That tension runs through the rest of the episode. Talk of AI companions and sex robots leads to a surprisingly tender point: the best relationships run on humor, and there's no skill in making a robot laugh. Then Jason opens the hood on the content system he's spent months building for Kindling Solutions. Feeders scan YouTube, X, and news outlets and return 20 to 30 story ideas. A deep research protocol builds an angle and an argument for the ones he picks. Then comes the part Jason calls the secret sauce: AI interviewers modeled on the styles of legendary hosts question him until the spine of his argument is captured in his own words. From there a production desk takes over: a thumbnail studio he describes as a mini Canvaa video editor he rebuilt and says beats Descript, which flags retakes for one-click removalScreens, which maps about 10 structural patterns in his speech to approved animation templates and drops roughly 50 animations onto the timelineautomatic B-roll to fill the gapsThe guiding rule comes from Kindling's human design principle: humans are the thinkers, agents are the doers. Ryan compares it to Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, who famously builds songs from spreadsheets of titles and lyric fragments sorted by syllable. Jason pushes back on the idea that AI is killing art. The best AI work, he argues, comes from creators who pour in the same full creative effort Rembrandt brought to the canvas. The brush is different, not easier. Jason closes by previewing a seven-chapter series on leaving his corporate job to build Kindling. Ryan requests a cameo under the name Dionysus. Kindling Solutions: https://kindlingsolutions.com Jason Katz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99 AI for Founders is the podcast and newsletter for entrepreneurs using AI to build, automate, and scale, hosted by Ryan Estes. Join at https://aiforfounders.co Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

What if the business you're saving for retirement could go live before your coffee gets cold? In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes skips the interview and does something riskier: he builds a real business, live, in one hour, with every stumble left in. The rules were strict. It had to run from home with one person. It needed no degree, no certification and no pile of cash. And it had to be able to hit six figures. Ryan starts with the math instead of the idea. $10,000 a month is a $120K run rate. That's 10 clients at $1,000 each. Once the number is small enough to picture, the question becomes simple: what can you deliver that's worth a thousand bucks a month to ten people? His answer came from the intersection of what he loves and who he knows. Twenty years from now he wants to be in the woods hunting and fishing, with meditation as the side project. He's spent his career working with founders. So the business became meditation coaching for funded startup founders, post-exit entrepreneurs and C-suite executives. Then the four burners fire up at once. Claude Code starts building a Next.js site, repo on GitHub, deploy on Vercel, with a landing page, application form, blog and client portal. While it cooks, ChatGPT generates dozens of names (after Ryan asks it to cut anything that could read as cultural appropriation), and the brand lands on Cinder. ChatGPT also builds the color palette, word mark and a mascot so cute the chat voted it straight onto the site, plus a playful this-or-that quiz ("Your brain at 11 PM?"). Gemini turns the mascot into a hero video with the slogan "Stillness for people in motion." The quietest move might be the smartest one: a content engine of 11 blog posts published every other day, loaded with outbound citations, number-driven stories and free Unsplash images, built to get found by Google and by the AI assistants your future clients already ask for advice. For anyone learning to automate a business with AI, this is the unpolished version worth watching. Claude Code is the best coach for Claude Code. You don't need to understand every tool. You need an idea, an hour and the nerve to hit send. How do I pick a business I can start this week without credentials?Start where your skill meets an audience you already understand. Ryan paired meditation, something he cares about, with founders, the people he's spent his career serving. Your expertise becomes your moat. How will clients find me with no ad budget?Build a content engine. Eleven posts written for the exact searches your ideal client makes, published every other day, with real citations so both Google and LLMs trust them. What if I don't know how to use Claude Code?Ask Claude Code. End prompts with "ask me any clarifying questions before you start" and it will surface what you didn't know to decide. Tools used in this episodeClaude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-codeClaude Console (API keys): https://platform.claude.comClaude in Chrome: https://claude.com/chromeChatGPT: https://chatgpt.comGemini: https://gemini.google.comWispr Flow: https://wisprflow.aiGitHub: https://github.comVercel: https://vercel.comNext.js: https://nextjs.orgSupabase: https://supabase.comMux: https://www.mux.comUnsplash: https://unsplash.comCanva: https://www.canva.comZoom: https://zoom.us Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Eric Marton spent 25 years learning exactly how broken American healthcare is, from the inside, at the top. Health system executive. Private equity. Partner at two venture funds. The kind of career that ends in board seats and boat drinks. Then he took a portfolio company up to NVIDIA headquarters in Santa Clara to look at molecule design, sat in a room full of tenured scientists from Stanford and Berkeley and UCSF, and watched an AI generate drug candidates on a screen in front of them. One scientist leaned over to another and said that would have taken five years in my lab. The second one leaned back and said probably closer to ten in mine. Eric says he only understood a fraction of what was happening in that room. He understood enough. Before he left the building, NVIDIA's people walked him into their agent demo environment and showed him what enterprises were building to close labor gaps and protect margins. He asked them the question that ended his old life: what would it take to put that same power in the hands of one family, permanently, loyal only to them, following them across every insurer and employer and state line for the rest of their lives. NVIDIA said absolutely we can do that. A few months later he told his partners at the fund he had never been more professionally excited, and he walked. Then December 4, 2024 happened. Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was killed in Manhattan. Eric got a call the next day from someone connected to government asking how the technology he had been describing could reach the average American rather than only wealthy ones. Forty-five minutes of riffing turned into a plane full of people flying to Los Angeles the following week to meet with a company that did not exist yet. Eric says he has never had the chills professionally the way he did that day. What exists now is Agentic Healthcare, and its flagship is Teleport Health. The strategy is the opposite of what every venture capitalist tells you, including the venture capitalist Eric used to be. No narrow wedge. No one disease, one workflow, one insurer. He decided the fragmentation of US healthcare is not going to be solved in his lifetime, so the play is to wrap it: thousands of specialized agents fine-tuned for clinical navigation, benefits optimization, bill assessment and negotiation, pharmacy savings, appeals, scheduling, all pointed at one member with what he calls unwavering loyalty to the individual. To make that real he bought the rails instead of building them. The Cures Gateway now pulls records from more than 20 state and regional health information exchanges, with coverage for more than 128 million people, so a patient can finally claim the lifetime record that has been legally theirs and practically unreachable. Wrapped around it is the privacy layer that came out of TripleBlind, the RSA award winner that Selfii had acquired before Agentic took the platform on. https://agentichealth.io/ Eric Marton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmarton/ Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Kostas Koukoravas came out of lockdown about ten kilos heavier, having taken up baking like half the planet. So he did what a former Microsoft product manager does. He started logging his food. MyFitnessPal first, which meant weighing everything and then typing it in, which meant quitting. Then the AI photo apps arrived and made logging fast, which was great until he found the research: photo estimation nails what the food is and badly misses how much of it there is. Qalzy cites error rates reaching 65%. Here is the part that turns a nuisance into a business. Those misses do not cancel out. Two hundred calories on breakfast, two hundred on lunch, two hundred at dinner, and by bedtime you have invisibly eaten an entire extra meal. That is the difference between losing weight and wondering why you are not. So Kostas and his co-founder Michael Michelis, a nutritionist who runs one of the biggest calorie-counting communities online, built a kitchen scale with an AI camera bolted to it. Put food on the glass, press one button, and it identifies the ingredient, weighs it to the gram, and logs the calories and macros against a database of 2.9 million verified foods. No phone. Which matters more than it sounds, because the moment you are actually cooking is the moment your hands are covered in raw chicken and your phone is the last thing you want to touch. Ryan, a serious home cook who has been tracking macros since the spreadsheet era, immediately gets it: with a scale, logging happens while you cook, not from a plated photo that has no idea how much butter went in the pan. The receipts are early but loud. Kostas says users with the scale stick with tracking roughly 60% longer than app-only users. Returns have been close to nonexistent since launch. And Ryan's own story is the perfect control group: 35 pounds down between September and April, then six flat months of what he cheerfully calls gaslighting himself about portions. Then the conversation turns into a full hardware masterclass, and this is the part every founder should sit still for. Two software guys who were used to pressing a button and shipping code spent a year on prototyping alone. Kostas's line of the episode: plastic is alive. Prototype resins behave nothing like production ABS, tolerances drift with humidity, and a high gloss finish means every stray thumb during assembly is a scratch you just paid for. Their factory team in China ground through iteration after iteration to get it right. They funded it the way more hardware founders should. Kickstarter, where a six-figure pre-order haul proved demand a VC would have asked them to prove first, covered the molds and the minimum order quantities, and doubled as a product research panel. The multi-user feature, now nine profiles per device, only exists because backers kept asking whether their spouse could use it. Glucose response tracking in the app exists because type 1 diabetics asked for it. Stretch goals became a feature vote. Qalzy: https://qalzy.com Kostas Koukoravas on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/kostas-koukoravas-46b201 Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Did you know that winning a lawsuit can be a worse bet than a Vegas table? Morgan "Mo" Duffy Tregenza thinks so, and she has the courtroom miles to back it up. Mo grew up in Telluride, Colorado, the daughter of a zoologist, back when mining and ranching families still shaped the town. She's an attorney by training. Her grandfather spent 30 years as a judge, then became a mediator in retirement. He taught her that people stand behind outcomes they help build. Mo figured out early that she had no interest in tearing the other side apart. So she stood in Denver County courts asking judges to hand her cases to mediate. Today she's the founder and CEO of Levelheaded, a Denver company pairing certified mediators with Keel, its AI resolution engine, on a mission to make the world less litigious. Ryan Estes and Mo dig into why the US legal system runs like the world's priciest group therapy. By Mo's count, about 97% of cases never reach trial, and winners collect only about one time in five. That's why she tells friends to skip the lawsuit and take the vacation. The heart of the conversation is how great mediators work. Rapport comes before anything else. People get space to vent. Then comes looping: repeating back what you heard, in neutral words, until you see someone put down the sword. Mo covers the practical side of settling, too: Why the fight is rarely about the broken contract.Why the first offer is almost always the best one.Why both sides have to walk in knowing what they'll give up.She also shares the story of two rural Colorado neighbors whose decades-long feud ended with an annual Christmas tree, plus the glass of water lesson every founder should tape to their monitor. Then the conversation turns to AI agents. Ryan is building an autonomous agent and obsessing over her personality. Mo breaks down the mediator traits that belong in agent design: Honesty without cruelty.Process discipline.Curiosity.The humility to admit a mistake the moment it's caught.They also explore why AI org charts will need an AI mediator, and why agents built by different companies will need a referee. Mo describes a Zoom plugin idea that drafts the agreement before the call ends. If you're scaling a startup with AI, or quietly dreading a co-founder conversation, this one will help you put the glass down. Levelheaded: AI-accelerated mediationhttps://belevelheaded.com Email Mo [email protected] 1% for the Planethttps://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native, you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Congress wants a roll call of your AI agents. Could you produce one by Friday? In early September, Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler introduced the Stop Rogue AI Act. The bill would have NIST write standards for tracking and logging AI agents, including a live, machine-readable inventory of every agent on a network. Meanwhile, carriers like Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, Travelers and AIG have been writing AI exclusions into standard commercial policies. The era of "give everyone a Claude seat and see what happens" is getting expensive. Santosh Kaveti has a sharper take on that roll call. He is the founder and CEO of ProArch, the Atlanta firm he built over two decades to bring cloud, data, security and AI into a single conversation. In his view, a list of agents tells you very little. The question that matters is whether you can trace any AI decision back to why it happened. "The agent did it" will not survive a courtroom or a customer call. His fix sounds almost old-fashioned: treat agents like people. Give each one an ID, onboard it, monitor it, and put a named human on the hook for what it does. Then baseline your risk across infrastructure, applications, data and AI. That includes the agents your ERP vendor quietly shipped last quarter that nobody on your team evaluated. Santosh and Ryan also get into why the "AI will kill coding" story keeps missing. Santosh is watching great programmers turn into 100X AI workflow engineers. Teams without checks and balances, on the other hand, are piling up AI slop that costs millions to unwind. He explains why a services firm pours money into R&D, pointing out that end of life is written on every MSP and MSSP. He also shares why ProArch hires for curiosity and for people who solve problems beyond their own silo. Then it gets personal. Santosh protects six to seven hours of sleep and treats tonight's crisis as tomorrow's problem. He grew up around entrepreneurs on both sides of his family, who taught him to build conviction, do the work and stop waiting on results. He grows turmeric on his farm in India and bought a farmhouse in Ellijay, Georgia last year. His next dream is mountain land in Costa Rica planted with coffee and mangoes. If one of your systems made a bad call tomorrow, could you explain it? Press play before someone asks. Mentioned in the episode ProArch: https://www.proarch.com Santosh Kaveti on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santoshkaveti/ Loftie smart alarm clock: https://byloftie.com Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native, you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Ryan Estes has a confession. He is terrible at hiring. Not incompetent. Worse. He is charmed. Put him in a room with a candidate and forty-five minutes later he is quietly in love with a person's mind, their weird hobbies, the way they think about problems that have nothing to do with the job. Then a colleague walks in and says the thing nobody wants to hear: they were not qualified. So Ryan took himself out of the process entirely. Shar Broumand thinks that was the wrong fix. Not because Ryan is wrong about himself, but because Ryan misdiagnosed the problem. "You have a process problem, my friend." In Shar's world, the founder who falls in love with people is the single most valuable interviewer on the panel. He is just being asked the wrong question. Put him in the culture seat, take him out of the competence seat, and suddenly the bug becomes the feature. That one reframe is the spine of this episode. Shar is CEO of Zero Hiring, one of eight AI-native companies built inside Infinity Constellation, the holdco spun out of Invisible Technologies. He is also, by his own count, on his eleventh company. He is not a recruiter and has never been one. He was, for most of his career, loudly critical of the entire recruiting industry, which is roughly the profile you want in someone trying to rebuild it. His conviction traces back to a room in Pittsburgh. Thirty years after FreeMarkets was founded, around 300 alumni came back for the reunion. Shar stood in the middle of it and did the math on the people around him: dozens of CEOs, a sitting US senator, an absurd density of operators who went on to build serious things. FreeMarkets was a struggling startup with no money when it hired most of them. It also put every candidate through eight hour-long interviews, each with one assigned purpose, ending in a round table where you either championed a hire or said "over my dead body." Inefficient beyond belief. Also the reason that room existed. The question Shar carries out of that memory is not "how do we interview more." It is: what if we built the reusable rocket version of that? Zero Hiring's answer is an AI recruiter running an end-to-end process with humans holding the judgment. You tell it you want to hire a marketing manager. It interviews you, drafts the job description, waits for a human to approve it, then pushes the role across the network. Thirty applicants can land in ten minutes. It scores and ranks them. It does not eliminate anyone. Qualified candidates get a link, 48 hours, and a fifteen-minute AI screen that a human recruiter can go back and grade. Then real people decide who moves. The pricing is where founders sit up. No monthly fee, no tools to buy, no ATS to license. 6% of the cash component of the role or less, split in half: half when the role opens, half when someone accepts. Shar calls it electricity. Always wired into your company, only billed when you turn the lights on. Mentioned in the episode Zero Hiring: https://zerohiring.com/ Zero Hiring contact: [email protected] Shar Broumand on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbroumand/ Infinity Constellation: https://www.infinityconstellation.com Links Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Thirteen days from now, the FDA convenes a panel that has never convened before. On September 23, 2026, the Molecular and Clinical Genetics Panel sits down to vote on Grail's Galleri test, the first multi-cancer early detection test ever to reach an FDA advisory committee. Every founder building in early detection is watching. Shlomi Madar is watching too. He just is not building the same thing. Madar is the CEO of SpotitEarly, an Englewood, New Jersey company founded in 2020 that screens for four cancers from a single breath sample collected at your kitchen table. Grail reads methylation patterns in cell-free DNA. SpotitEarly reads a mask you breathed into for a few minutes. And the sensor at the front of its pipeline is not a machine. It is a beagle. This is the part where most people assume it is a gimmick. It is not. Madar has a PhD in cancer research from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the reason the company landed on dogs is boring and rigorous: nothing built by humans comes close. The entire field of electronic noses, mass spectrometry included, keeps running into the same wall, which is sensitivity threshold. A dog detects at parts per trillion. Madar's favorite way to explain it: fill two Olympic swimming pools, stir half a teaspoon of sugar into one, and a dog will tell you which pool you tried to trick him with. The problem with a dog is not the nose. It is that a dog cannot fill out a lab report. That is the entire engineering problem SpotitEarly set out to solve, and it is the reason this episode belongs on a founder podcast rather than a science one. Madar's team spent five and a half years turning an animal's opinion into a reproducible, scalable, auditable data output. Here is how the machine actually works. You breathe into a surgical mask, seal it, and mail it. At the lab, the mask goes into a sniffing port, a cone shaped device where the dogs interact with the scent. A camera watches from above. A second small camera inside the port captures facial gestures. A microphone captures breathing patterns. The dogs wear vests with accelerometers tracking velocity. Each sensor feeds its own trained machine learning model. Video gets broken into frames, frames into pixels, and the models hunt for deviation from a database that already associates canine behavior with positive and negative samples. Multiple dogs sniff each sample. Each dog sniffs more than once. Thousands of data points per sample, and the AI layer throws out anything that deviates from the norm. The company calls the platform LUCID. The Rainbow Study, run with medical centers in Israel including Sourasky, Hadassah, and Rambam, put 1,386 participants through it under double-blind conditions and reported 93.9% sensitivity and 94.3% specificity. Per cancer sensitivity came in at 97% for lung, 97% for prostate, 94% for breast, and 86% for colorectal. At stages zero to two, the earliest ones, performance held. The paper ran in Scientific Reports. Madar is careful, repeatedly and unprompted, about what the test is. It is a triage layer. A positive signal does not mean skip the mammogram. It means go do the whole standard of care gamut, and now you have two orthogonal methods pointing at the same thing, which is exactly what you want in screening. SpotitEarly: https://www.spotitearly.com Shlomi Madar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shlomimadar/ Connect and support the show https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Nobody warns you that traction is the lonely part. Broke and scared has company. Everybody has been broke and scared. What nobody prepares you for is the 11 PM decision, three years in, revenue real, team growing, and not a single person left who understands the shape of the problem. Your friends stopped relating around round two. Your family cannot parse the question. Your team needs you to already know. Steve Phillips solved that problem the hard way, six times. He is the founder of Zappi, the consumer insights platform he launched in 2012 as ZappiStore, which raised $170 million in growth capital from Sumeru Equity Partners in December 2022, employs more than 300 people across 13 countries, serves more than 350 enterprise customers, and is approaching $100 million in ARR by his own account. He handed the CEO seat to Aaron Kechley in October 2024 and moved into Executive Chair and Chief Innovation Officer. Then he did the thing almost no exited founder does. Instead of collecting non-executive director seats and giving advice people were free to ignore, he automated the role. CEOfriend.ai gives founders a working advisory team: a CFO agent modeled on the conservative finance people Steve has worked with for two decades, an entrepreneur agent that gets genuinely excited about your bad idea, an investor agent that keeps asking where the enterprise value is, plus marketing and sales and AI readiness advisors. Seven days free, then $29 per user per month on an introductory offer. The mission Steve states out loud: make every small business 20% better. This episode goes deep on the mechanics of that build, the psychology of stepping down from your own company, why the pre-launch phase feels so good and is so dangerous, and a morning ritual involving bare feet, wet grass, and a cup of coffee in a Camden garden. CEOfriend, free competitor analysis and 7 day trial: https://www.ceofriend.ai Steve Phillips on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-phillips-2121ab/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Everyone got the same tools. Almost nobody got taste. Jacqueline Schmidt grew up two subway stops from tigers. The Bronx Zoo was her backyard. Her favorite exhibit was the sloth, which she went back to visit twenty-five years later and found out had died. She spent summers collecting salamanders in the woods and carrying them home in her Smurf boots, fifty at a time, to the ongoing horror of her grandparents. She drew animals constantly. Then she sold the drawings. Then the drawings became a company. Today she is CEO of Radiance, an AI-powered design agency backed through Infinity Constellation's $24M Series A, running a proprietary Creative OS called The Source®, with clients including Coca-Cola, MoMA, CBS, NBC, Guess, Crate & Barrel, Barnes & Noble, Anthropologie, West Elm, and Siggi's. The through-line from salamanders to Series A is the thing this episode is actually about: what survives when the tools stop being the advantage. Because right now, they have stopped. Jack's Instagram feed is wall-to-wall ads promising a design agency can go from $10K a month to $100K a month by plugging in one AI tool. Then she takes real meetings and gets handed real decks. Same fonts. Same colors. Same soulless template with a different logo on top. "The originality is kind of lost," she says. The tools got more powerful and taste got more rare, so everyone is swinging the same hammer and almost nobody is building anything memorable. She has a name for what happens next. Digital Darwinism. It is the title of the TEDx talk she gives at TEDxSouthlake on November 8, 2026, and the argument is blunt. In a landscape where every founder has the same generative tools, the selection pressure is no longer access. It is memorability. Who evolves. Who is sticky. Who is left. She frames it as a question you should be able to answer in one word: Warby Parker does not need its logo for you to remember that blue. Do you have a color, a feeling, a fingerprint that survives without your name attached? Which is not an argument against AI. Jack is more bullish than most people making that argument. She rebranded her entire company in a single weekend because she could not stop working. She calls the tools a playground and says she cannot put them down. What she wants back is the distinction between the work that deserves a human and the work that does not. "Was I put on this planet to left-align data?" The business she has built is the answer to that question, and it is stranger than a normal agency. Radiance is an agency plus an intelligence layer. Where most shops pull freelancers in as needed and let the institutional knowledge leave with whoever quits, Radiance is building the memory layer underneath. Her framing of the problem is the sharpest thing in the episode: your logo came from one vendor, your marketing strategy from another, and then Bob decides he wants to become a surfer and walks out with all the mind share. Who was collating, organizing, and storing the brand? Nobody. That gap is the product. Radiance: https://www.withradiance.com/The Source®: https://www.withradiance.com/the-source LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueline-schmidt-92a3734b/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Five days. Twelve-hour build sessions. One founder describing himself as delirious. Jason Katz opens this one by announcing he has AI psychosis, and he is only half joking. Five straight days inside Claude Code, shipping, prototyping, handing off to his dev team, and coming back for more. It is the kind of week that either produces a business or produces a burnout, and the whole episode is really about the difference between those two outcomes. Ryan is in the same trench from the opposite direction. He shipped Howdi to 36 people after roughly six months of building, and the thing that got him unstuck was not a new tool. It was a hypnotherapist. One session, mostly just saying the problem out loud to another human, and the week broke open. What makes this one useful is the gap between those stories and the systems underneath them. Jason walks through why a vibe-coded prototype and a production-ready system are separated by a canyon most founders never see coming. He lays out how Kindling decides what to build and what to walk away from. Then he opens up Chief of Staff, an app he has in testing with executives, and describes something genuinely strange: you start with a blank slate, talk to it every morning for ten minutes, and 30 to 45 days later you have a complete operations plan you never sat down to write. The back half turns into a conversation about avoidance. Not the failure kind. The ordinary kind, where you know exactly what the most important task is and you find four other things to do first. Jason's take is that AI killed one of the biggest reasons for it, because the scope of an unfamiliar project is no longer unknowable. You brain-dump the whole mess by voice and get a map back in minutes. Then Ryan drops the first item from a list of twelve things he believes supercharge execution, and it is not a tool, an app, or a supplement. It is: build a family. Become a person a partner can thrive with. Learn to relish domestic life as an engine for getting things done. Jason, who says he avoided that exact thing for most of his life, backs it hard. Two operators, mid-build, saying the quiet stuff out loud. This is what it do. https://kindlingsolutions.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai! ⁠https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Sixty percent of the faces training AI were never asked Katrien Grobler woke up on the 29th of December and saw a word written above her bed. Not metaphorically. She describes seeing the name in her mind's eye, getting up, and telling her team they were pivoting that day. The word was Twinnin. She had spent the previous year running AI KAT, making AI-generated video ads for clients like Capital.com and Reckitt's Dettol brand. On one project she needed a trader character. Rather than generate a synthetic face, she pulled photos of an investor she knew, ran them through Nano Banana, and built the character. The client's first reaction was the whole business model in one sentence: is this a real person? It was. He hadn't been asked. She called him afterward, apologised, and made him sign a licence. That awkward phone call is now a company. Her argument runs on arithmetic she calls the math of human likeness. There are 8.3 billion people on the planet. Frontier labs have already consumed images of humans at a scale in the tens of billions apiece, and by 2030 she projects the training requirement climbing into the trillions. Models cannot reuse the same face indefinitely. They need novelty, and novelty means new humans. Meanwhile the legal ground is moving under everyone: the EU AI Act's obligations landed, Denmark is rewriting its copyright law to treat likeness as property, and the NO FAKES Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously in June 2026. Demand is accelerating. Supply is becoming illegal. There is no clearing house in between. That gap is the company. Twinnin verifies a human with government ID and a liveness check, lets them set granular terms for how their face can be used, hashes the consent record so it is auditable, and routes payment when a brand or lab licenses it. Seventy-five percent goes to the human, always, agent or no agent. Then there is the half of the market that wants nothing to do with any of it. When Deadline clipped her panel and posted it, the comments were not friendly. One person told her she looked like an Incredibles villain, which she thought was fantastic. Most of the rest were worse. She did not dismiss them. She built for them. The Defend product exists because she concluded that people who want to opt out have nowhere to formally do so, and that a documented, timestamped "no" is the only evidence that holds up when a deepfake surfaces. The other half of this episode is about how she operates. She has been to a contrast therapy club in Canary Wharf more than three hundred times since April 2025. Sauna, then a three minute plunge at one degree, then sauna again, sometimes three cycles before a call. She does not describe it as recovery. She describes it as a forced thinking environment. You cannot leave, you cannot distract yourself, so the problem you brought in gets solved. Most of her best product decisions happened underwater at one degree. Twinnin: https://www.twinnin.ai Katrien Grobler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katriengrobler Ryan Estes on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai! https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/